New Yorker article on Lee Smolin’s visceral attack on string theory. ‘The paradoxical situation of string theory
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Kathy Young for Capital News 9: “By the end of the week, the universe could be expanding, with the addition of three new planets to our solar system.” Hilarious. Given the relative size of the known Universe to our solar system, this is the equivalent of saying: “By the end of the week, the earth could be expanding, with the addition of three grains of sand on a beach in Florida.” Capital News 9 | 24 Hour Local News | HEADLINES | A cosmic change
A quarter of everything that exists has just been found. BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Team finds ‘proof’ of dark matter
Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy – Advanced Physics Forums “We can choose to look at thermodynamic entropy in two different ways. One approach would say that a high entropy state is information poor because there is so much disorder, and the disorder is essentially random. The other approach would say that a high entropy state is information rich because to truly describe the exact state of randomness in all its gory detail would require lots of information.” This outlines the confusion of the difference in the ‘sign’ between Shannon and Boltzmann entropy. It is basically a confusion over the difference between a state which has meaning to a particular observer, and the notion of absolute meaning where bits of information are stored in the smallest possible moving (hence thermodynamic) particles. What if the latter case were subjective? There is possibly no such thing as absolute entropy, or energy or information…
Nice explanation of diff between Shannon and Boltzmann etropy. Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy – Advanced Physics Forums The information entropy is the log of the number of accesible states, and is dimensionless. The thermodynamic entropy is equal to the information entropy times the Boltzman (sic) constant. (kB = 1.38×10^-23 J/K) so the thermodynamic entropy has units of energy per degree kelvin. It is worth noting that present day computers process so little information compared to the number of equivalent thermodynamic states accesible to them, that the information entropy of the device is insignificant compared to the thermal entropy. I believe this means that present day computers operate nowhere near the thermodynamic limits of computation, so in a certain sense the equivalence of the two forms of entropy is irrelevant except that it does allow one to place theoretical limits on the process of computation.
Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA – New York Times
… sound of sporadic popping of blood vessels from Redstate.com readers, accompanied by light banjo music: || RedState Summary of the argument against global warming from Redstate.com Its not true. Oh shit, it is true – then it has absolutely nothing to do with my fat-ass pickup truck. Paws off. Like the nice guy who used to work for Exxon explained, there is no link between tobacco and global warming. CO2 is not the problem because thats too complicated and requires math. Its gotten hotter because someone turned up the volume on the sun control. Oh shit – 99% of scientists say they have evidence that my fat-ass pickup is partly to blame. Scientists are all commies, so their views are political and therefore not scientific. We should only take science advice from people who sell fat-ass pickups becuase they are not commies and are therefore unbiased. Bush looks like…
The Oil We Eat (Harpers.org) Richard Manning proposes that staples such as wheat, corn and rice are plants that thrive in the type of barren flooded landscape the were the result of the catastrophic melting following the last ice age. Farming, he proposes, is the ‘nuking’ of the landscape, the clearing of the forest. “Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.” Interesting article, however, the opening points which state that all our energy comes from plants capturing solar energy, ignore geothermal, gravitational and atmosperic energy. As can be demonstrated by the fact that we could theoretically grow plants underground under electric lights powered by the tidal energy from the…
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Saturn’s moon ‘best bet for life’ “If the magma were to cool, he said, it would become more viscous, increasing friction from tidal churning and so producing more heat. But if temperatures veered higher, the magma would flow more easily, and tidal heat production would reduce accordingly.”